(I wrote this short story a while ago, but the news
is catching up fast, so I'd better put it up now.)

"Look, Agent Bellamy, I appreciate you coming out,
but it's three in the morning. Can we set up a time
to discuss this tomorrow, and can your people check
the house while I'm at the office?"

Jack Murphy was too tired to follow some involved
technical discussion with the big Intellectual
Property Enforcement agent, who sat in Murphy's
old steam-bent office chair, briefcase at his feet.
Murphy, quickly dressed in chinos and Stanford Law
sweatshirt, sat in his new ergonomic chair at a
gleaming glass and metal desk. The desk looked out
of place in the rambling Maryland house that Linda
had found when Murphy accepted the appointment in DC.

"Yes, basicially. Although it's not really a
site, just a system for communicating and trading.
That's what makes it so hard to shut down."

"Well, all I know is that if you jailbreak your
computer you can get on anonymously and buy drugs or
guns or whatever."

"That's right. Let me show you an example."
Bellamy pulled a plastic IPEA evidence bag out of his
briefcase. Inside was a heavy semiautomatic pistol.
It was raw machined steel without the usual blued
finish, and a blank slide where the manufacturer's
name and serial number would be. The plastic bag,
oily on the inside, looked like it was lined with
little rainbows. "You can't make steel parts like
this on a 3D printer, but you can make parts for a
plastic machine that will cut aluminum. Then you
can use aluminum parts to make machines that can cut
steel. People trade machines, parts and weapons every
step of the way. This one's complete, and it works.
It was on its way to an underground gunsmith who puts
a nice finish on them."

Murphy could see the shiny steel reflected in both
of the room's immaculate black windows. "It's like
Adam Smith's pin factory."

"Yes. And this piece could have come from any
combination of thousands of basement workshops.
It's completely untraceable, and infringes a zillion
patents. These things are a headache for us, but
that's not why I'm here."

Murphy leaned over the desk, and Bellamy continued.

"There's also an online scene called the prediction
markets. Oh, hold on, sorry." Bellamy spoke
quietly into his jacket cuff. The agents who had
arrived with Bellamy were still doing some kind of
security sweep of the house. Murphy was glad that
Linda was away, dropping Jack Jr. off at college.
Security stuff always put her on edge.

"All right. Prediction markets," Bellamy said.
"If I want to bet on a football game, I can buy a
prediction, say 'Eagles win on Sunday.' If they
win, after the game the prediction expires and I
get a dollar."

"Sounds like just online gambling. They're just
saying 'prediction' instead of 'bet.'" Murphy yawned
and shook his head to try to clear it.

"Yes, it's like an ordinary bet in a lot of ways.
If the Eagles lose, my prediction expires worthless.
Just like losing a bet. But those predictions trade
up and down, like stocks and bonds, right up until
the end of the game."

"And they're untaxed and anonymous."

"Right. And there are other predictions I could make.
I could buy a prediction on 'Jack Murphy dead before
October 14th'." And if, for whatever reason, you're
no longer with us that day, I make a dollar."

"So is that how the assassination market works?
Someone just makes a bet that somebody else will be
dead?"

"That's one side of the deal. That's the bet that the
assassin makes. Someone else has to take the other
side of the bet, and lose. If you want somebody
dead, you just place a bet that they'll be alive.
You lose your bet, but they get taken care of."

One of the agents who had come in with Bellamy was
standing in the office door. His light blue gloves
and shoe covers didn't go with his dark blue suit.
He was holding Murphy's laptop computer, with Murphy's
mobile phone and charger on top.

"We're going to need to check those in the van,"
Bellamy said. "We'll have them back in ten minutes."

Murphy nodded and the agent turned and left.
Bellamy had introduced him but Jack was too tired to
remember the name.

"So the original client, or whatever you want to
call him, makes a bet, and loses, and the assassin
wins, and that's how the assassin gets paid. But you
said a dollar. Nobody's going to murder someone for
a dollar."

"Right. There has to be some volume in the market
for it to be a significant risk. A lot of people
have to be willing to buy those predictions of 'Jack
Murphy alive.' and lose the money."

"So how is my stock doing?" Murphy knew that DC
was still chattering about the news of his surprise
appointment. The Secretary was an old colleague
from think tank days, but nobody expected that the
President would go along with bringing Murphy in.
The President was too good a politician not to have
his own person in every department's number two spot.

"That's why we're here. There's a lot of volume.
A lot of outstanding predictions on you alive."

"They're predicting I'll be alive because they want
me dead." Murphy finally yawned and got his hand
over it.

Bellamy just continued. "Yes, that's right. The good
news is that the administration has an independent
fund for protecting appointees. Our agency can't
know about it officially, of course. That fund buys
the same 'dead' predictions that an assassin would.
Makes it less profitable for the assassin. Basically,
we play the market to lose. It's expensive, and
it's not a hundred percent solution, but it's the
best answer so far."

"What about just going after the people who want
me dead?"

"Frankly, sir, that wouldn't scale. Between the
senior citizens and the cat thing, our market model
says that more than four hundred thousand people
have some money on you. If you're alive next week,
they make a little money. If you're dead, they're
happy too."

Murphy was silent.

Bellamy said, "They don't really think of it as
gambling. More like they're hedging their exposure
to your continued existence."

Murphy looked up. One of the other agents, whose
name Murphy didn't remember either, was standing
in the doorway. "We're clear, sir. No cameras or
devices left. Verified no other residents present.
Charlie team is watching the egress. We're good
to go."

"All right." Bellamy ripped open the evidence bag
and pulled out the raw steel untraceable pistol.
The room smelled of some kind of oil.

"What are you doing?" Murphy yelled. His voice went
up in a squeak at the end. He grabbed for his desk
phone and realized it was gone.

"Sorry, sir," said Bellamy. "But the money in that
slush fund has to come from somewhere. Sometimes we
play to win."

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation
bills itself as "Smart Ideas for the Innovation
Economy," but what they're putting out there is just
a well-summarized version of the conventional wisdom
on creepy adtech: The problem is that if
users are not tracked, then websites cannot deliver
targeted advertising. Instead, websites would only be
able to use non-targeted advertising which does not
generate as much revenue. Less revenue means less
free content and services for Internet users. But
privacy advocates are pushing forward, regardless of
the consequences.

I believe they're wrong on both points. First,
the idea that the whole industry can profit by
going creepy. I don't doubt that individual
ad campaigns can get better click-through rates
when targeted. But targeting tends to fuel a race
to the bottom for content, and a decrease
in signaling power for the medium as a whole.
Look at the end of the road adtech is taking, and
you'll see email spam already there, funding no
content and satisfying no users.

Second, the conventional wisdom says that
irresponsible "advocates", not regular
users, are behind demands for privacy tech.
I
wondered about the demand for web ad blockers back
in 2009, when hardly anyone was using them.
Ad blocking had been around for years as an
easy-to-install browser add-on, much easier than
a bunch of things that did catch on. But calling
it a niche product would have been generous.
Nobody did it.

Today, though, ad blocking is is
over 9 percent, and spawning at
least one startup to help sites deal
with it. What changed? Three words: What
They Know. This popular Wall Street Journal
series started in 2010, and began explaining adtech
practices to the public, well enough that the
explanation stuck. And a lot of other mainstream
media coverage followed. If you believe the
conventional wisdom, we should have seen something
like: 2009, hardly any ad blocking. 2010, the WSJ
explains how well customized those ads are to you.
By 2011, ad blocking should disappear, right?
Why should I block what's relevant to me? Instead,
the opposite happened. People discovered the extent
of tracking, and ad blocking finally went mainstream.

In a way, ad blocking is following in the footsteps
of spam filters, which were also niche for a long
time before they became a must-have. We missed
the opportunity to align privacy tech with laws
and norms to help everyone, both users and legit
advertisers. Shortsighted lobbyists at the DMA got CAN-SPAM
passed, which helped the bottom-feeders (who probably
don't pay for DMA memberships anyway) but made it a
never-ending challenge for legit DMA members to get
a legit email newsletter through.

There are a lot of details to work out
about how the norms and protocols for
online ads have to change, all the way up
and down the stack, to support real advertising,
and not just direct response. (Firefox
is making progress, for example.) But starting
with the conventional wisdom on creepy tracking
will get us to the wrong place. The real danger
here is that the policy conversation about Internet
advertising is missing a voice. Somehow, the chair at
the debate reserved for Advertising is not occupied by
Advertising in general at all—it's been reserved
by the vendors of specific creepy techniques.

Every day, Facebook has an audience that is three
times the size of the Super Bowl's audience. That's
every day, not just once year. Yet, in its entire
history, not a single person has ever mentioned or
discussed or remembered a single fucking ad they've
ever seen on Facebook.

Is it just me, or is everyone getting really tired
of synchronous communications channels such as IM and
phone, and of software notifying them about things?

Steve Pavlina: Please
Don’t Interrupt. When you interrupt someone,
on average it takes them 23 minutes to get back to
the original task, plus up to 30 minutes to return
to the flow state so they can be fully productive
again. Almost half of the time you interrupt someone,
you’ll actually knock them off task completely,
such that they won’t return to the original task
right away when the interruption ends. You may think
you’re only putting them on pause for a minute
or two, but the actual break from the task that
results from your interruption may be significantly
longer.

Joel Gascoigne: Zero
notifications: With zero notifications, I feel
like I can get my head stuck into a problem much more
easily than I did before. I never realised when I had
those notifications on that they truly could throw
me off my current thought and cause me difficulty
getting that focus back. More than anything, I feel
a lot calmer. Notifications create a sense of urgency
around something that’s not important at all.

Terry Heaton: Bombardment
anyone?The advertising industry assumes much
in its practices, the biggest of which seems to be
an inherent right to disrupt any experience of human
beings in order to sell them something.

Stephen O'Grady tried Turning
Off Email on his phone and tablet. Over
the two weeks I was on break, the difference was
startling. Most obviously, I was less focused on
my devices, because when I picked them up, they had
nothing new to hijack my attention. More subtle was
the mental impact. Instead of a relatively constant
stream of interruptions coming from inbound email, I
checked sporadically, at times of my choosing. Instead
of being jarred out of my vacation day by the
arrival of an email that I might not have to act upon
immediately but which I would unavoidably be turning
over mentally while I was supposed to be on vacation,
I simply went about the business of enjoying my
downtime. It was refreshing. My first day back
from vacation, I debated whether to turn the sync
back on. In the end, I did not.

John Scalzi's new voicemail greeting, in Killing
My Voice Mail: Hi, this is John Scalzi. I
will never ever ever ever listen to the voice mail
you’re about to leave, because voice mail is a pain
in the ass.

Harald
Welte: Why I hate phone calls so much: It is
simply impossible to get any productive work done if
there are synchronous interruptions. If I'm doing
any even remotely complex task such as analyzing
code, designing electronics or whatever else, then
the interruption of the flow of thoughts, and the
context switch to whatever the phone call might be
about is costing me an insurmountable amount of my
productive efficiency. I doubt that I am the only
one having that feeling / experience.

Russell Coker: Phone
Calls and Other Distractions. I have
configured my laptop and workstation to never alert
me for new mail. If I’m not concentrating then
I’ll be checking my email frequently and if I am
concentrating I don’t want a distraction.

Or maybe we can trace it all the way back to Prof.
Donald Knuth, who wrote, in 1990, Email is a
wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to
be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be
on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours
of studying and uninterruptible concentration.

I think we can do better than that. The best early
example of the notification-driven life, IMHO, is the
1961 story Harrison Bergeron, by Kurt
Vonnegut, Jr. George, while his intelligence was
way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio
in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all
times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every
twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send
out some sharp noise to keep people like George from
taking unfair advantage of their brains.

I haven't tried any of the interesting-looking
cloud stuff in this release, but it might be an
interesting platform to use to start experimenting
with flexible, low-cost private clouds, too. For now,
it's good on the laptop.

Charles Fishman at The Atlantic: The
Insourcing Boom(print
version)An exploration of the startling,
sustainable, just-getting-started return of industry
to the United States.

Kevin Drum for Mother Jones: America's
Real Criminal Element: Lead. New research
finds Pb is the hidden villain behind violent crime,
lower IQs, and even the ADHD epidemic. And fixing
the problem is a lot cheaper than doing nothing.

Remember CAN-SPAM?
This was the US Federal law that overruled state
laws on email spam, some of which were strict, and
cleared the way for advertisers to send all the
spam they wanted, as long as they followed a few
basic rules. It was a huge lobbying victory for the
Direct Marketing Association.

Today, the data, the tools, and even the law are all
there for advertisers to take full advantage of email
spam. The CAN-SPAM debate is over. The Internet
privacy nerds lost, and database marketing won.

So where is all the CAN-SPAM compliant spam?

After all, it seems like it should be a no-brainer.
Spam has everything that's promising about adtech.
Web ads promise targeting, but spam has been able to
deliver it for a long time. Why aren't advertisers
using it?

Let's go back and look at the potential
of adtech. In Ad Age, Adam
Lehman, COO and General Manager at Lotame, writes,
With the enormous variety of information available
through the Internet, I am able to do research on
running shoes across diverse sources. Based on the
interests I express through my research, I may be
presented with downstream advertising offers, which
I can take or leave.

The key word here is "downstream." Lehman goes to a
running site and somehow expresses interest in shoes.
Later, while he's browsing some other, possibly
unrelated, site, an advertiser "retargets" him with
a shoe ad. The "downstream" site can be running
whatever the hell is the cheapest content that Lehman
is willing to look at at all, because adtech magick
will stalk, sorry, retarget him. That's the adtech Holy
Grail. Instead of having to place ads
on relevant content, an advertiser can
chase the user onto cheaper and cheaper
sites. (An example of this effect is the problem
of ads showing up on infringing sites.
When technology starts automatically searching
for cheaper and cheaper places to run an ad,
it inevitably connects with the Internet's
bottom-feeders. But that's another story.
If you're in adtech and not reading Chris
Castle, the webmasters of skeevy rip-off sites
are so far inside your OODA loop that you might as
well not bother.)

Anyway, back to spam. What if you took adtech and
turned all of its qualities up to 11? Exact user
targeting? Sure. Email addresses are in marketing
databases already. Save money on content? Can't get
cheaper than free. Take every adtech concept and
max it out, and you get email spam.

But what's wrong with that? John Battelle writes,
It’s actually a good thing that we as consumers
are waking up to the fact that marketers know a
lot about us – because we also know a lot about
ourselves, and about what we want. Only when we can
exchange value for value will advertising move to a
new level, and begin to drive commercial experiences
that begin to feel right. That will take an informed
public that isn’t “creeped out” or dismissive of
marketing, but rather engaged and expectant – soon,
we will demand that marketers pay for our attention
and our data – by providing us better deals, better
experiences, and better service. This can only be
done via a marketing ecosystem that leverages data,
algorithms, and insight at scale.

As they say on the Internet, d00d wtf? The first step
in me getting a better deal is for the other side
to have more information about me, and for
me to be engaged and expectant about that?
If that's true, advertisers should be able to (1)
Dump the company accounting database as CSV (2)
Upload it to Wikileaks (3) PROFIT!

Information asymmetries work in favor of the side
with more information, and no hippy-dippy talk about
"engagement" and "ecosystem" is going to change that.
If you know enough about individuals, you can
give better offers and service to the high-Whuffie
customers, and rip off the rest. Or discriminate in
other ways.

IBM is already offering a social analytics package for
mobile carriers that will let them see how influential
a customer is over the carrier choices of others.
From there, carriers can easily partition the
support tree into customers worth paying attention
to and others. The open question is how close is
the relationship between customer-avaiblable social
metrics such as Klout and the internal scores.
"I have to call support...better get my Klout above
50 or I'll be wasting my time."

But back to email spam. Which is the
digital version of direct mail, which
is the paper version of a cold call. The problem
with that whole kind of communication is that it's
based on extremely fine-grained data on the seller's
side, and none on the buyer's.

An advertisement that's tied to content, in a
clearly expensive way, sends a signal from the
advertiser to the buyer. The extreme example here
is an ad in a glossy magazine. It'll still be on
that magazine years later, and every subscriber
gets the same one. Almost ideal from a signaling
point of view. The other extreme is a cold call,
which carries no "proof of work" or signaling value.
All the information is on the seller's side, so the
cold call is of no value to the recipient.

Which is why users block email spam. It's worthless.
Even spam that complies with CAN-SPAM is worthless.

Now look at web advertising. A web ad is
neither magazine ad nor cold call, but somewhere
in the middle. The key problem with adtech is
that it's moving web ads further and further away
from magazine-style, with signaling value, toward
spam-style, with no signaling value.

It's no coincidence that as adtech gets "better,"
users are blocking more ads. If you crank up the
targeting far enough, the ads start to carry so
little signaling value that the web will become a
refuge for bottom-feeder advertisers, the way email
spam is today. Adtech's success would be a failure
for advertising.

There is a better way, though. And print has it.
Fine Homebuilding magazine is actually
much more valuable to me because of the ads.
I can skip or view them as I choose, and, more
importantly, they convey valuable information to
me about sellers' intentions to sell and support
products. I'd prefer the magazine with the ads to
the magazine without them.

We need to start making a distinction between adtech,
which is creepy and wrong, and advertising in general.
We seem to be going down the path that advertising on
the Internet == creepy adtech. But advertising on the
Internet in combination with technology and norms that
respect privacy can be a good thing. After all, advertising
is good for both buyers and sellers when it acts
as a public signal of a seller's intentions. This has
always been true but will become increasingly obvious
as buyer-driven search improves.

So the hard part is making web advertising work
more like print advertising. That's going to take
good design and UX, and effective sales as well as
privacy tech. It's past time to revisit some of
the browser design decisions that affect privacy and
cross-site tracking. During the dot-com frenzy, the
industry made some bad decisions on how to handle
third-party cookies and scripts in the browser.
Today's browsers are a wretched hive of scum and
villainy, privacy-wise. But that's starting to
change. Tracking Protection Lists from MSIE are a
promising start, and the Firefox scene has a confusing
selection of extensions that implement some good
privacy improvements that are looking increasingly
likely to make it into the mainstream browser.

Online advertising will be worth a lot more when
we outgrow creepy adtech. The question is how to
allocate the costs of the privacy work—all
advertisers will benefit, so it's a classic free rider
problem. All advertisers would benefit by raising
online advertising's signaling power, which reducing
targeting capabilities would do, but a specific ad
can perform better if user-targeted.

And even if de-creepifying advertising is the right
thing to do, people aren't economically rational.
So they don't value each other's freedom even when
it's in their best interest economically to do so.
Adam Smith: The pride of man makes him love
to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so much
as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his
inferiors. Wherever the law allows it, and the
nature of the work can afford it, therefore, he
will generally prefer the service of slaves to that
of freemen. This comes in The Wealth of
Nations right after a long explanation of
how free labor is preferable to slave labor from the
POV of the employer/owner. We have to be realistic
when thinking about adtech's appeal to conventional
marketing decision-makers, who could easily prefer
a tracked or locked-in customer to one with which
the vendor might have a more profitable equitable
relationship.

Paul Barter: Adaptive
Parking in a Nutshell. Adaptive Parking
aims to make our parking supply and behaviour less
rigid and more responsive to changing contexts,
including trends away from automobile dependence.
By contrast, conventional parking policy tends to
lock an over-supply of parking into the landscape,
regardless of changing transport preferences and
urban market trends.

Meanwhile, it looks as if advertisers are getting the
picture on privacy tech, quickly. Erin Griffith writes,
if things keep going the way
they have, many adtech startups may
find their products are suddenly useless. (via Andre's
Notes).

Privacy tech is rapidly going beyond "Do Not Track" to
more sophisticated approaches—browser developers
are finally fixing some of the bad assumptions about
third-party content that the industry made back
during the late-90s dot-com frenzy. (If you'd like a
user-friendly preview of where the browser is going,
try Ghostery.
Privacy tech for people who aren't
necessarily privacy nerds, just willing
to put up with a little inconvenience.)

Why all the mainstream attention
to privacy now? We can probably thank retargeting.
When a pair of shoes that you looked at on one site
starts "stalking you" across apparently independent
sites, it's hard to miss. Alan Pearlstein writes,
We collect a lot of anonymous data about every web
surfer. No need to shove that fact in the consumer's
face, it only freaks them out.

Pearlstein recommends taking a subtle approach, but it
looks like the freak-out is already in full effect.
Erin Griffith has it right: the industry needs to
get ready for a post-adtech environment.

So why worry about advertising
at all? One study by Ferdinand Rauch, Advertising
and consumer prices, concludes, The
aggregate effect is informative, which
means that, on average, advertising decreases
consumer prices. Advertising is good for the
economy, overall. At some point we'll be thankful
that browser makers have made the right moves to save
it from creepy adtech.